About Nine Francois

From the series Animalia Series. I use photography to express selective truths. My images start off in the realm of the objective, as do all photographic records, but frequently don’t stay there. At some point in their creation, I tweak them to make them mine – to take them out of fact and reportage and place them into the service of expression and exploration. The Animalia series follows this trend by dint of the picture-taking process. These images are all photographed using film and a medium format camera, which is slow, bulky, loud and left/right reversed. I get physically very close to my subjects, sometimes close enough to touch them (there are no bars or screens between us), and have to devise all sorts of mechanisms for being able to stay this close without alarming them. My reward for attempting this process is that sometimes I catch the animal in exactly the right place in a way that eliminates the context and concentrates on the iconic shapes and essences of the animals. Hopefully, the intimacy of the process translates to the viewer when looking at these magnificent creatures. Making discoveries, exploring and sparking conversation through visual language is my passion, and makes the photographic experience meaningful and rich for me.